I suppose another way of thinking about this might be that in contexts where there is a sufficiently strong expectation that one will say certain words as part of a social ritual, with implications that are at best very indirectly related to the literal meaning of those words, “lie” is a type error. On this model, we could just say that “How are you?” handshakes are using actor norms rather than scribe norms.
What I’m saying is that it’s not at all just a chance coincidence that the actor norms happen to use words that sound like they mean something specific in scribe dialect. The scribe-dialect meaning functions as a sort of jumping-off point for the formation of a customary social action. This has the important side effect of preventing people from unambiguously using those words in scribe-dialect. The accumulated effect of all such transformations is a huge drag on efficiency of communication about anything there’s not already an established custom for.
What I’m saying is that it’s not at all just a chance coincidence that the actor norms happen to use words that sound like they mean something specific in scribe dialect.
Indeed, it certainly is not a chance coincidence; as I explained elsethread, that the handshake sounds like a question allows it to serve the additional, and highly useful, function of granting someone plausible deniability for deflecting actual prying/questioning with non-answers in a socially acceptable way. (My comments about “power relations” say more on this.)
I suppose another way of thinking about this might be that in contexts where there is a sufficiently strong expectation that one will say certain words as part of a social ritual, with implications that are at best very indirectly related to the literal meaning of those words, “lie” is a type error. On this model, we could just say that “How are you?” handshakes are using actor norms rather than scribe norms.
What I’m saying is that it’s not at all just a chance coincidence that the actor norms happen to use words that sound like they mean something specific in scribe dialect. The scribe-dialect meaning functions as a sort of jumping-off point for the formation of a customary social action. This has the important side effect of preventing people from unambiguously using those words in scribe-dialect. The accumulated effect of all such transformations is a huge drag on efficiency of communication about anything there’s not already an established custom for.
Indeed, it certainly is not a chance coincidence; as I explained elsethread, that the handshake sounds like a question allows it to serve the additional, and highly useful, function of granting someone plausible deniability for deflecting actual prying/questioning with non-answers in a socially acceptable way. (My comments about “power relations” say more on this.)